Procedural Processes -- Lessons Learnt From Automated Content Generation in "Easy Money?"
0No Show Conference 2012 - Heather Decker Davis & Luke Dicken
Creating the number of levels that players are coming to expect from casual games can be a daunting task for small teams -- especially when you factor in replayability and difficulty progression. In this session, Luke Dicken and Heather Decker-Davis detail the process of developing "Easy Money?", a casual game that relies on procedural level generation. The goal of the session is to showcase some techniques that have been learnt across the whole development process. Not only will the mechanics of Artificial Intelligence system driving the generation of fun and engaging levels be explored, but also how using this approach impacted both the design decisions of the project, as well as the artistic direction. The experiences related in the session should enable teams to apply similar methodologies in their own projects and have greater success wrangling this increasingly necessary topic, which can otherwise be fraught with peril.
In this session, attendees can expect to learn about the ways that implementing procedural content generation can affect your overall workflow, your approaches to early implementation and prototyping and importantly the manner in which you iterate your designs. Although all of this will be presented in the context of the development of "Easy Money?", the lessons imparted are intended to be generally applicable.